The role of the police and police department has all along been primarily defined in terms of crime prevention and control. Community policing has however transformed the entire image of policing. Community policing refers to a value system that permeates the police department with the primary organizational goal of working in cooperation with citizens, both individually and in groups, private and public organizations to identify issues that affect the livability of the community and resolve them together. The police departments that have adopted community policing have realized that police alone are not in a position to effectively deal with community issues alone. For maximum effectiveness and efficiency, the police have to partner with other relevant parties with whom they share a mutual responsibility in handling various issues that affect the community. The concept of community policing stresses on the prevention, timely identification and intervention to enable the police to counter them before they develop into unwieldy and hard to resolve problems. Since the establishment and continued development of community policing in various places around the world, policing has been able to achieve a variety of achievements among them improving the relationship between community members and enhancing a positive impact of police officers on the livelihood of the people other than just fighting crime.
Principles and Elements of Community Policing
The concept of community policing has its roots in several other previous developments such as the police-community relations, crime prevention, the rediscovery of foot patrol and team policing. Since the 1990s community policing has expanded and advanced to becoming a dominant policing strategy. Community policing has a tactical dimension that ultimately translates philosophies, ideas as well as strategies for concrete tactics, behaviours and programs. While some individuals have been insisting that community policing is entirely a philosophy and in no way a program, the concept itself proves to be a program in that it results in some actions such as the change of behaviour. Without such effective actions, the whole concept of community policing would be just a rhetoric and not a reality (Miller, 2017). Community policing has a series of important tactical elements among them positive interactions, problem solving and partnerships.
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Positive Interactions
Traditionally, policing has inevitably been involving often negative contacts between law enforcers and citizens such as through arrests, stop-and-frisk encounters, and orders to desist among others. Community policing in full realization of these negative contacts has been recommending that law enforcers offset the negativity in the highest way possible through enhancing positive interactions when possible. With increased positive interactions, the police department has been in a position to yield various benefits such as building familiarity, confidence and trust between the police officers and members of the community. Community policing is there to help the community understand that the police are there to serve them and they should, therefore, support and respect them other than fearing and perceiving them as their enemies. With such a changed perception and improved relationships, the officers get a chance to become more knowledgeable regarding the specific issues within the community (Peak, 2014). The citizens since they trust the officers and have adequate confidence in them provide them with the necessary information to aid criminal investigations and the social problem-solving.
Essentially, community policing through positive interactions breaks the monotony of the traditional motorized patrol. There are various ways that police officers in the police departments that have embraced community policing engage in and enhance positive interactions with members of the community. Police officers strive hard to ensure they maximize the involvement of citizens in a majority of its operations through various ways and means. In many occasions, retired seniors and college interns volunteer and engage in crime prevention and citizen patrols that are highly welcomed. Area commanders spearhead such programs and often meet with members of the public to be able to solicit both input and feedback. Additionally, they set various internal committees that also involve the opportunity for public participation. Majority of community policing policy decisions give room for the input from citizens with the department offering both formal and informal mechanisms to facilitate it. The department primarily aims at educating the general public about the works of the police such as through town hall meetings, websites, public-access television, face to face encounters and calls among others (Reisig and Kane, 2014). For maximum effectiveness, the citizens are allowed to review and comment on the performance of the department. In areas that community policing is embraced and implemented, citizens have a better understanding of what policing entails and the role they should play in helping the department achieve maximum results.
Routine call handling is one of the ways that police officers engage the community members. Other than rushing to clear calls and get back to the motorized patrols, police communicate with the members of the community through telephones. This is especially effective because the citizens who call do not have to fear about being victimized or spotted by the individuals they report. At the same time, it saves the police the time and energy of making random motorized patrols and provides them with essential information about hot spots (Peak, 2014). They, therefore, visit the hotspots more often and improve security in the areas surrounding them. Police officers have also been able to engage and interact with members of the community through physical meetings. This involves the officers taking every available opportunity to attend community meetings such as the civic club meetings, block watch meetings and any other gatherings that have the community members discuss issues that affect them socially. In some occasions, the police have even assumed leadership roles in community groups and meetings. This has been found to yield non-enforcement but productive interactions with a broader spectrum of the community. At the same time, the perception of the police by members of the community gradually changes. They feel free to share more of their problems with the officers other than just crime related problems (Miller, 2017). Police offer advice where necessary the citizens look up to them for help whenever they are in need.
Beyond the villages, police officers determined to make community policing a success also visit schools. Here they are able to interact more with the citizens especially the youths who in most cases have word some of the worst experiences with law enforcers. The students, teachers and other staff members get the chance to build a relationship with the police, ask questions, air their grievances as well as give the suggestions they well would make a positive impact on their lives. The youth understand that they do not have to free every time they see law enforcers but should perceive them as partners with whom they can share ideas decisively. In addition to visiting the community schools, police officers further embark on interactive patrols. The police officers have often been patrolling the community by watching what members of the public do in the many public spaces. As they patrol, community policing advises and requires that the officers stop at different points to talk with the citizens (Mohanty and Mohanty, 2014). This particular kind of patrol focuses more on interacting with the citizens other than just watching them and wishing that they could make a mistake and arrest them.
Partnerships
Strategic partnerships are another element of community policing. Since its inception, community policing has continuously stressed on the significance of active partnerships between the police, members of the public and all other relevant agencies whereby all the parties are expected to work closely together to identify and also resolve various problems. The initiative has given the members of the public greater roles in public safety and community development than it has typically been in the past. Private and public agencies also get the chance to leverage resources as well as authority towards the solutions to public safety programs (Schneider et al., 2003). While there are safety and legal limitations that dictate how extensive members of the public can participate in ensuring public safety, the small role they play such as in providing critical information with an extremely important role in improving the efficiency of the services delivered. Members of the community are more aware of the events that take place within them than the police. In case there is a need for the attention of the officers, the citizens having a healthy relationship are quick to consult them and solve any problem before it escalates to a state where it will result in dire consequences. For instance, when there is a problem of drug abuse in a community, the police may not discover until it has gone to the level of addicting the users and affecting their daily functions and behaviour. However, if the relationship is good between law enforcers and citizens, such as an issue is reported at the earliest stage possible. The intervention of the officers, in this case, is meant to help more than to arrest (Miller, 2017). The victims are counselled, and a whole community is saved from an oncoming crime gang that would be born out of excessive usage and abuse of drugs including illicit drugs. There are various ways in which the police can improve their partnerships with members of the community as they strive to achieve the goals of community policing.
Citizen patrols have been some of the ways in which the community members cooperate with the law enforcers. In this case, the citizens are allowed to actively patrol their community neighbourhoods often with the cooperation of the police officers and usually cellular phone and radio communication with the police dispatch. In many police departments in the countries that have embraced and invested in community policing, the police have established what they refer to as the citizen police academies. In these academies, the academies are usually held in the evenings where the police officers get the opportunity to inform the citizens about the operations of and responsibilities of the police department, preparing them for their respective voluntary roles in patrols (Miller, 2017). Majority of the police departments also maximally utilize volunteers, reserves and auxiliaries in numerous non-sworn and sworn roles. The schools have also been helpful platforms for the police to engage citizens through school resource officers and other relevant programs. For different building and safety violations, the police deal with locations that are susceptible to a code enforcement. There are other locations within the community that are overcrowded and that have histories of crime and civil law violations. In this case, a nuisance abatement is applied whereby some procedures can be followed to see these locations closed down, demolished and their ownership forfeited to the government. To help in handling issues to do with rental properties and leasing practices, the police departments have also been working closely with tenant associations, apartment managers and public housing managers among other similar groups. This proves that community policing is more than just controlling crime and arresting crimes (Peak, 2014). It focuses on handling social problems before they escalate to crimes that would result in arrests and prosecutions.
Problem Solving
The concept of community policing advocates for the adoption of problem-solving or conflict resolution orientation towards policing. This is different from the traditional incident-oriented approaches and prevails together with the modern professional model. As usual, the emergency calls have to be handled with immediate effect. The officers in the modern departments spend most of their time handling individual incidents. When possible, the officers are expected to search for the various underlying conditions that facilitate both single and multiple incidents. After that, they are affected by the police officers as a strategic way of preventing and controlling similar incidents in the future. A majority of police departments have been using the scanning, analysis, response and assessment model (SARA) as the guide to their problem-solving processes for any kind of non-crime and crime problems. They also give a chance to the guardians who equally have necessary skills in problems solving (Miller, 2017). The guardians include individuals such as school principals and landlords.
Problem-solving is a paramount element of community policing, and the officers utilize as many as processes as possible to make it effective. Some departments utilize the beat meetings which are meeting between beat officers and the community residents to identify various problems, effectively analyze them and further brainstorm the possible solutions. Additionally, the departments also analyze their call for service to identify the specific disproportionate numbers of calls and facilitate problem-solving measures to minimize the rate of calls in such areas. They are commonly referred to as hot spots. There are other jurisdictions whose problem-solving teams are not only the police officers but also includes other agencies representatives such as code enforcement, sanitation, public works and recreations among others (Miller, 2017). This is to ensure that there is an array of information and resources that can be brought to bear the problems after they are identified.
Positive Effects of Community Policing
While there has to be the positive and negative side of every concept, there are numerous positive effects that community policing has had altogether. The United States has had states implement community policing and yielded some positive effects to show. Given names such as trust policing, guardian policing, relationship-based policing, partnership-policing or problem-solving policing or community policing, the names have a mutual vision. Compassionate, humane and fluent cops with a mindset of respect, who do not fear or hate black men and who serve long enough to have known the residents across the US, speak their languages as well as partner in them in improving their neighbourhood (Beck and Rice, 2016). At its inception, the US believed that community policing would successfully reduce if not stop bad policing, increase public safety and bolster law enforcement. Over a decade later, the US may not have achieved its ultimate goal but has made some significant progress. For instance, in East Los Angeles and Watts, Police Department’s Community Safety Partnership unit operates across seven of the most violent public housing projects in the city. The officers call out the residents each by their names greeting them when patrolling on foot in the company of a gang intervention specialists (Beck and Rice, 2016). The police officers have managed to earn the trust of the city residents through participating in various neighbourhood activities. The officers have engaged in relationship enhancing activities such as buying bifocals for the aged, helping in starting a farmer’s market as well as organizing sports leagues for children. With these units, the police officers are not promoted for the number of arrests they make but for their demonstration of how they transformed a child who was headed to jail and increased the community’s trust towards the police (Miller, 2017). Most importantly, while the residents of high-crime areas were traditionally viewed as potential deportees or suspects, the police in community policing view such residents as strategic partners in public safety. In the white neighbourhoods, they are encouraged and trained to see black people, not as some misplaced threats.
For over two decades since it was introduced, community policing has remained to one of the most important innovations in American policing. The many advantages that have been experienced have always outweighed the identifiable disadvantages. The benefits of police and resident partnership are manifest. Within the first year, the community safety partnership in Los Angeles posted one of the department’s steepest crime declines and had since then sustained the drop. Almost two years since the beginning of that partnership program, several housing projects that had initially suffered several killings annually did not record even a single murder. In Watts, the no shootings have been recorded by the partnership officers in more than five years (Beck and Rice, 2016). Among the many positive effects that community policing has had not only in the US but across the regions that implement it include eliminating fear within the community. With the increased law enforcers presence around the neighbourhoods, the residents feel secure. The feeling of security has further helped police departments establish maximum trust within communities. As the members of the community become increasingly active in guarding their livelihoods, they also get to understand the role and responsibility of the police officers in their day to day operations. Community policing has successfully improved the relationship between the police and citizens which has ultimately improved the community’s quality of life while reducing the rates of crime. The flexibility of community policing has positively contributed to the achievements that have been made across the communities that embrace it. As the communities change so do the strategies and the solutions to policing change. A strategy that works in this community does not necessarily have to work with all the others (Ren et al., 2005). The concept allows the members of every community to generate solutions that can work within their respective neighbourhoods and also eliminate and if possible change the solutions that fail to work or that are no longer relevant to their current set of challenges or problems.
Flexibility and commitment to both the residents and the police officers makes community policy achieve a myriad of benefits. The community members are a pool of talents and have ample resources that aid the police efforts and extend the strained police resources to ensure that they do not run short of the necessary resources to offer the necessary services. Having the community on the side of the police has benefited the police in their call to prevent and control crime. The increased involvement of the police officers in the community daily activities have aided in the successful revitalization of the communities across the US (Peak, 2014). This has been made possible by the willingness of both the citizens and the police officers to invest their efforts, time and patience that is necessary for the implementation of community policing programs. The effects have proven that the police on their own are not in a position to prevent crime and have further proven that the future of police work will still depend upon active public cooperation (Reisig and Kane, 2014). There are various ways that community policing has helped the police achieve the goals it has managed to achieve irrespective of the many challenges it has been facing in implementation.
Direct Contact
The concept of community policing has enabled police officers to come into direct contact with business operators and residents regularly. This has been the main reason that the community members have been able to develop trust in the police and strong relationships have been built. Watts and Loa Angeles are perfect examples of this when their current security states and perception of the police by the residents is compared to the situations before community policing was introduced in the United States. The cities and states that have designated the number of community police officers have experienced increased public support, and their work has been made easier with the collaboration of the residents both in ideas and in resources. In some communities, the police departments have established what they refer to as the Neighborhood Watch (Reisig and Kane, 2014). The program has aided the efforts of community policing by bringing together law enforcers and the citizens in a common interest to fight crime. The information that the citizens provide has been more effective in helping the police counter crime. The citizens again are pleased with the ideas of having to call upon the police whenever a social problem arises, and the police come with an eagerness to help that problem other than making arrests and have people jailed. The members of the community on the other hand no longer have to be afraid of being victimized like it was common in the traditional model of policing. With community policing, once an offender is spotted, the police aim to help and see that particular offender transform to a responsible citizen other than having them spend time in jail (Peak, 2014). Transformed offenders become the key advocates of community policing and strive to have other offenders transform as well.
Identification
In Los Angeles and other cities across the US, the effectiveness of policing has been facilitated by easy and accurate identification. The police officers have in this case been able to gain intimate knowledge that enables them not only to identify but also analyze crime patterns. With timely identification, the officers together with the community residents have been able to utilize all the available problem-solving techniques and effectively respond and correct any potential weaknesses as opposed to responding to crime after it has already occurred and damages have already been done. The accurate definition of community borders has been essential in facilitating effective community policing. Initially, the traditional models of precincts and jurisdictions did not accurately reflect the entire community. Effective and fruitful long-term prevention of crime depends on the involvement of the police in the overall aspects of a community. The police-resident relationship is not built once a crime has occurred (Mohanty and Mohanty, 2014). With community policing that aims at preventing the crime way before it occurs, a relationship has to exist even before a crime is witnessed to enable the officers to cooperate well with the citizens they are already used to.
Contentious Relationship
In foot patrol that was conducted in Flint, Michigan, the officers reported that the citizens did not fully understand the responsibilities and the roles of the police or the limitations and the laws that are imposed on the officers. Notably, the citizens how had initially had bad encounters with law enforcers were not likely to cooperate with the police officers. This has given the officers the role of countering and confronting the negative public opinions that have existed especially in relation to their relationship with the judicial system (Greene, 2000). During this patrol, the officers reported that citizens lacked the faith in the judicial system as a result of the perception they have about lenient sentencing. Lenient judicial systems are accused of perpetuating criminal activity by failing to hold criminals fully accountable for crimes committed. Criminals, on the other hand, exploit this by increasing their offences and challenging their officers since they are sure they will not go beyond the police arrests (Terpstra, 2009). Community policing has however worked hard to stop this by preventing crime in the first place and ensuring that only a few limited cases get to the attention of the judicial system. Officers wish to rehabilitate and transform the criminals through dialogue and positive intervention other than arresting and pushing for their incarceration.
The Challenges of Community Policing
Most of the focus in community policing is directed towards the benefits and the advantages it has brought about to policing and to the community. However, the critical challenges that police departments have experienced in the course of implementing community policing have often been overlooked. Just like the traditional model of policing, community policing has had its fair share of challenges, but the challenges have been overwhelmed by the numerous benefits achieved. One of the major challenges that have been faced in implementing community policing is establishing and developing the foundation of the concept which is a strong relationship between the officers and the citizens. In communities that have had a completely negative perception of law enforcers, changing the perception to a positive and friendly one has not been an easy task (Mastrofski, Willis and Kochel, 2007). An example of such an incident was experienced in Los Angeles after an officer has shot dead young man shooting at the police. Irrespective of the danger that a man shooting at the police posed, the angry community members almost got back at the police officers. It took the intervention of an emergency meeting with the officers and the painful session eventually ended concluding that while the death of the young man was extremely sad, shooting at the cops was like knocking the door to death. It took a serious dialogue to convince the angry members of the community who had already imitated a “kill the cops” talk in retaliation to the murder after rumours had spread that the shot man had already surrendered. Were it not for the meeting and interaction with the police; there would have been unrest (Beck and Rice, 2016). Had it been in the past, there would have been no dialogue but running battles with the residents fighting back the police with rocks and bottles, and the next day calm would have resumed.
Incidents of racial profiling in the past have continued to sustain a significant gap between the police officers and the people of colour. Irrespective of the intense efforts to counter this, the majority of black people across the cities still have a phobia for police. A strong relationship between the black people who have been victims of racial profiling, discrimination and victimization in the past find it rather hard to be able to trust the police with any information. The continued strained relationship is a threat to community policing because it is from these relationships that the whole concept is built. However, the police department still has the resources and abilities to improve its relationships with all people irrespective of their race, gender or age. The ultimate goal cannot be achieved with a part of the population being left out or opting out. However, the significant progress that has been made gives the hopes of better situations in the future whereby the entire population will have a common perception of law enforcers (Mastrofski, Willis and Kochel, 2007). The citizens have to provide information to trigger and enhance the intervention of the police. If they are not free enough to share the information with the police officers, the objective of community policing may not be achieved after all.
Conclusion
Community policing can be termed as one of the greatest achievements of the 21 st century. Traditionally, citizens have always perceived the law enforcers as their rivals. The police officers, on the other hand, would experience difficulties in fighting crime since they had no one to provide them with information and would in most cases react to crime when it had already been committed. With community policing, citizens and police officers have collaborated with to ensure that crime is maximally prevented and countered before it causes severe damage. Most importantly, the role of policing has proven to be more than just controlling crime. The involvement of police officers in additional community activities that improve the livelihood of the citizens goes beyond to servant leadership. Regions that have managed to implement community policing successfully have achieved numerous benefits such as a significant decrease in the rate of crime. This is a positive gesture, and with the positive results, states across the world may plan for a future in community policing. At the same time, the changing perception of the police by citizens and the improved relationship between the officers and citizens has made the communities peaceful and free of fear. Community policing has particularly had a positive impact on dealing with criminal activities. Other than targeting criminals for arrests and incarceration, police are focused on changing and transforming criminals into responsible citizens. This is a long-term achievement considering that traditionally, arresting criminals and incarcerating them had no great impact on the community since they would still re-offend after they were released from prison. Community policing as evident in the case of Los Angeles has seen former gang members and criminals transform to peace advocates in the community. Regions world over should consider community policing especially in a time that terrorism is proving to be a real-time threat.
References
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Miller, L. S. (2017). Community Policing: Partnerships for problem-solving . S.l.: Cengage Learning.
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